


The Windows Were Broken In

by prestissimo



Series: Lost Entries from the Daily Ledger of Nicolas de Lenfent [9]
Category: Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Bitterness, Gaslighting, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, M/M, Pining, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-18
Updated: 2019-06-18
Packaged: 2020-05-14 01:23:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19263130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prestissimo/pseuds/prestissimo
Summary: How Nicolas was (not) handling Lestat's disappearance.





	The Windows Were Broken In

**Author's Note:**

  * For [monstersinthecosmos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/monstersinthecosmos/gifts).



_I’m still half-asleep when a sharp, dull pain enters my foot. I blink down at broken glass, and when I look up, the Garde de Paris is here, weighing the bribe I’ve placed before them to ask for an investigation._

_Let this be a nightmare, please. I try to tell them, it’s a kidnapping, not a break-in. Papa begins to whip my legs. The switch is old and dried, not young and supple enough to slice, and I feel tears of relief rise. So it **is**  a nightmare. I always dream this before performances. My little piece of penance. _

_I will wake up and Lestat will be there and I will be tired but grateful and gentler with him. Perhaps gentler with myself, as well. Yes, let this pain absolve me as my ill-fitting atheism cannot. What does it matter if I shall die powerless, penniless, forgotten on profane ground? Let this be over soon, I want to hold Lestat and feel his warmth and pretend there is a future for any of us._

* * *

“Good morning, Monsieur! It is time to wake up!”

My housekeeper sounds very loud this morning. I nestle closer to the softness beside me and huddle under the blankets so she cannot see the tears. For a moment, I paw at my wet face quizzically, before everything washes over me at once. All my aches and pains from the night before awaken and I remember the nightmare.  _Fuck_. 

I push through the headache and out of the covers and it’s Jeanette  _and_  Lucinda, sweeter and more innocent in naked sleep than they ever are clothed. The night before is awash with sourness and I hope they don’t remember any more than I do.

“There is a caller who wishes to speak with you directly, Monsieur.”

I snatch a pair of Lu—no, that black  _lace_  is certainly not Lucinda’s—Jeanette’s underthings from the chair and slide into them for decency’s sake, much to my housekeeper’s dismay. She’s turning away from me as I stumble, almost entirely nude, through the maze of clothes to find a shirt and some breeches. 

“Did they say who they were or why?”

“No, M’s—Monsieur! I must ask, are you quite  _decent_?” I had not known she could be so shrill, and I wince. 

“Madame Trecorte I humbly  _beseech_ you to speak in a softer tone, for our surroundings hint not that you have been remiss in your duties but that I have had quite a bloody night of it.” My last clean shirt left and a pair of breeches later, and I’m shoveling my hair back from my face in great swathes. “Mmf—have you a ribbon, Madame?” 

She huffs, which would be funny if my head weren’t splitting in half right now, and slowly backs towards the sound of my voice, her hand holding out a silk ribbon.

“Merci,” I say, snatching it from her hand, and she chances a glance at her employer. Save for my stockings and a jacket, I am more or less presentable, and she sighs in what is likely more resignation rather than relief. 

“And the visitor?” I splash some water on my face and through my hair, then abandon the rest of my toilet to pull stockings and shoes on my way through this house bought to keep me quiet. Was I so enamored of our escape that I failed to realize that he hadn’t understood me at all? I had almost hoped that his father had captured him in the night, or someone political caught wind of his nobility. 

But when the house came, I suspected he’d sold his soul for something. A house, so we might live together in warmth and comfort? So he might learn to read and I might focus on my music? But no secret missive came in the night to assure the one person who had  _heard_  him that all was well, that he was  _safe_ , that we would be together again soon. That’s when I realized the others were right, as always, and I was once more the  _ingénu_. 

“The man insists he’ll only speak with you, sir,” she answers, and helps me into a comfortable green frock coat. She judges me, but few have her eye for outfits, so I say nothing, provoke nothing. It is a shame she only comes for a few hours a day, but I suppose I must make do with what our great  _Lord_   _Lestat_ permits.

” _Eh bien et merci.”_ We nod to one another, though I feel pale and aching, as if she doesn’t think I’m a rentboy, as if I don’t look as badly hung over as I feel, as if I have a scrap of credit left with anybody in this city. 

> Nicolas de Lenfent can’t take a hint. 
> 
> Nicolas de Lenfent staged a break-in for the attention.
> 
> Nicolas de Lenfent  _lies_.

So now that I am once more alone, what else does he want? The only thing I have for company is wine and Lestat’s mysterious coin. 

The man waiting dresses like a tailor’s assistant. My heart sinks down into my gut and I only barely return his nod in time. Merchants’ boys know the tilt of the table. But has he come with summons to a funeral? Was there no one from the draper’s guild in Paris to bring me such tidings? As he begins to talk, my heart lightens, my chest relaxes, and I realize my father walks the earth alive and well. Just as I learn to breathe once more, another weight sticks in my throat.

This is a summons to a fitting. For clothing. 

“So he intends to dress me as well?” I mutter,  _sotto voce_ , but the tailor’s boy has sharp ears and he raises an eyebrow. He begins to detail the suits, the fabrics, and all the outfits planned for my appointment, but I can tell he thinks they’re wasted on me. Ten different things I could tell him about the weave of his shirt and his lace and his jacket. Yet he supposes I must be an uncouth layabout with a lover who is trying to civilize him, and I’m good for a bit of rough but no use bringing home to cultivate, no. Paris holds many houses in which to escape an inconvenience. One way or another.

Did I once think that about Lestat? Lestat, who couldn’t read his own reviews, his own scripts? Who knew I could not both practice and help him remember his lines. Was this another sacrifice for us both? 

Lestat, who took you? Who keeps you in their grasp? I bribed the guardsmen, I coaxed, persuaded, and bullied everyone we know to help me look for you, I called in what favors I could. I kept some, Lestat, thinking perhaps we’d need them in the future. If I could spend all of them now to remedy the dark poison inside us, inside  _me_  most of all, I would not hesitate again. Is it even you, or someone who has stolen your name?

“Does he talk to you?” I suddenly ask, interrupting his sales pitch, because I understand now. 

Lestat is not biding his time. I have done everything a sane man might do to investigate foul play, to make some sense of all this madness. I vacillate between betrayal and anguish, and I do not know what there is left to me: nearly twenty, disowned, no certificate of learning or credential to indicate my worth, and misled once again by an older boy with no future for me in his life, wielding fantasies of an impossible world. Did I think just because I had found someone else impossible, that God was telling me I  _mattered_? I forgot that sin comes in pairs, the way Adam and Eve did.

“Pardon, M’sieur, but I did not hear—”

“Does he talk to you?” I demand of him once more, advancing on him at the thought that he spoke with Lestat, Lestat whom I have defended against all, for whom I have played the fool, the madman, and the drunkard!  “I wish to meet with your employer. Why does he hide from me? What is Philippe Roget to him, hm, that suddenly this  _lawyer_ can do everything for him!”

There it is. 

“Monsieur Roget serves his client honestly, and—” 

“Give me the address to his offices! If you—”

“Sir, if you do not unhand—”

I release him, surprised at myself. I should eat. Drink. No, I’ve had enough of drink. 

“I…you do not find me as myself,” I say, by way of apology, but his hand is on the door.

“I will call at a more convenient hour,” he responds loyally. The retainer Lestat paid them must be considerable. 

“Who was that adorable thing?” Lucinda, behind me. I cannot think. I need her out of here, so I can  _think_. It’s just growing static in my ears as I watch her slink about the parlor and take up an empty wineglass from the night before. It is as round and orb-like as her breasts, where she nestles it as her hands root around empty bottles for more wine.

“Only someone trying to fetch me for costuming,” I reply, but my voice feels distant. The clarions are growing now in my head, and I manoeuvre awkwardly towards her, watching as my clothed legs carry me to her. She is naked from the waist up, and as she pushes me down to sit before her, I think if I can endure this, then I can endure this ordeal. Is Lestat testing me? If not, then what task could I fulfill, that would grant him cause to care about us once more? Would he care about last night?

“Unless it is a ploy.” To meet with me. My mind fetches up the familiar sofas and rug of a tailor’s fitting room. I am shown in, and Lestat is waiting there on the couch, happy and whole and  _safe,_ and he is laughing as usual while I embrace him furiously. The Illuminati, he says, or a dying heiress with an overenthusiastic trained ourang outang. I shall believe anything if it brings him back to me.

“Whatever does that mean, my foolish boy?” she asks, and God help me, she is plush, and warm, and that is a comfort when I forget myself in frightening thoughts. Her fingers latch onto mine, limp on my lap, and draw them to her. She opens her lips and tongues each callous of my fingertips. They are rigid and unbending against her soft tongue, and when she swipes at my softer finger pads, a shiver of arousal warbles through me before I can silence it. She was married, once. She knows the way of it.

“You only see it when we get you besotted with wine?” she asks, my hand in hers, suspended before her promising lips. I must look beyond words, ensnared by my sordid nature. “He used you. He took the broken heart of a rich boy and mined it for all that you had. Lestat used you to get to Paris, and once we were here, he used you to become an actor. Now, he’s found someone with more money, probably a title too, and he’s done with you. I’ve seen it a dozen times, worse off than you, with this fancy house.“

I don’t want it to be true, but my chest tightens at her every word.  _Foolish boy._   _You’re impossible_. We were supposed to be impossible  _together._

Lucinda lowers my hand and wraps each finger around her exposed breast, and it is so soft that I want to weep because all I want is the hardness of Lestat’s body against mine and the warmth of his laugh tingling through my skull when we kiss. But Lucinda is warm and comforting and I am unworthy of anyone’s notice, filled with sin and darkness that I am.

“Oh darling, pour us some more wine,” she says, as she pushes my jacket from my shoulders. 

“Shh, shh, shh,” she says, wiping at my face. “It’s too early. There you go, drink up. Mother’s milk for musicians, isn’t it? That’ll clear your head.”

“He’s coming back,” I insist, but everything is blurry and I feel so cold. There’s a draft. 

“Ooh, another round, then?” Jeanette. I took your lace underwear, I’m sorry, it…the windows were broken.

“What’s that, darling?” Lucinda’s in front of me and there’s more wine in my hand. I miss with the bottle and it slips away from the tears on my face and I choke back a sob and the girls giggle. We’re in bed again. Was it all a drunken dream? I start to laugh.

“The windows were broken in,” I tell them, but it sounds ugly and wrong in my ears. I must be mistaken. Just a rock. Lestat had left. I hadn’t heard him calling for me. I hadn’t heard myself calling back. Lestat used me and the only love he has left for me is cold and golden and  _clinks_  instead of laughs. “He didn’t want to go.”

“Oh, not this again, come here, love,” Jeanette says behind me, but I don’t want any more wine. I’m cold and the windows were broken. I cut my feet, I know that happened, and Pierre even insisted he’d been mistaken about seeing Lestat near the Louvre, only everyone had heard it already and assumed the worst. They think I’ve gone mad of a broken heart. I remember now, how they brought me home and undressed me, but it’s too late. Like any musician practicing, I have a habit of repeating myself until I get it right. Call it obsession. Call it professionalism. 

“You’re being paid by him, aren’t you? To do this to me. To make me forget about us,” I accuse suddenly, but my tongue is fat in my mouth and I slur my words. The girls roll their eyes at one another and they are both far too close and far too warm. I was wrong. This is a mistake. I want to remain cold and hard and strong until we can find Lestat again. I can’t let them confuse me like this.

“Go to the tailoring appointment,” Lucinda says, but I want it to be a dream and if it were a dream I’d be kissing her back, so I do. It’ll be a lovely story to tell Lestat in the morning.

“You love your fancy clothes, don’t you?” Jeanette asks, and with a lurching sickness in my gut, I nod and laugh when she tickles my nose with a silk handkerchief. It comes away wet, and there is snot on it. 

“Much better,” Lucinda comments after a moment of inspection. I blink blearily up at her. My throat feels dry and my tongue burnt out. This isn’t how the story is supposed to go. Where did I go wrong? What was the sin that did it? We belong together, so why isn’t Lestat with me in Hell?

“Honestly, you think the worst of everything, Nicki.”

“Don’t, don’t call me that. I’ve told you, only Lestat calls me that,” I tell her, but I don’t know who I’m talking to anymore. It’s hard to see when there is a great deal of soft pink flesh shoved in your face. 

“My poor, darling boy. You musicians are all alike. High-strung and overdramatic. You’d put us out of business if you didn’t love your music so much.”

“Ah, but you know his problem, mhm.” Yes, tell me my problem. I would ever so much like to know. What has befallen you, Lestat? What did I do to drive you away? I still don’t know which I would prefer.

“He thinks too much.”

“I’ll give you something to think about, Nicolas. Do you like that?”

Jeanette dances. She has the thighs for it, but not the heart.

“None of us will be buried on consecrated ground,” I tell them both, trying for sobriety and missing by a lifetime.

“ _Putain!_ That’s me done then. You’re too sober for bedroom talk _._  Lucinda, good luck with him!” I fall back against the sheets. There’s the slam of a door, loud and muffled at the same time inside my head. The ringing is coming back, and I grope for another bottle. I hear Lucinda rummaging. 

 _Please, hurry._ I don’t know if it’s Lestat or God or Lucinda I am beseeching. I want the bottle now. Preferably with wine in it.

She drapes herself over my shoulders, her warmth pressed against my back, and presents me with a lovely gift.

“There’s your beloved wine,” she says, as she begins to kiss down my shoulder. “But tell me,  _are_  you going to the tailor’s? Because I would  _love_  to see that handsome assistant again.”

I accept it gratefully.

“ _Oui_ , I’ll go.” I close my eyes, and I drink.


End file.
